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by Rebecca Romney

  It was not so much a miracle as a question of no one caring about people randomly littering in the Thames. Before stepping forward to intervene, a Thames commissioner would have had to know all the details of Emery Walker’s suit against Cobden-Sanderson in the High Court of Justice, as well as the resulting arbitration.

  Over the five months that it took to destroy the Doves Type, no one had the slightest inkling what Cobden-Sanderson was up to—not even his wife, Annie. If he hadn’t written with so much earnestness about his crime, the final whereabouts of the Doves font would have been lost to the ages. In addition to the sorts and the matrices and punches, Cobden-Sanderson burned most of the letters and other papers that had any connection to the Doves Press or the bindery. “I am determined that, as far as I am able to destroy, there shall be no debris left, no history of petty details, but only the books themselves.”

  The Doves Press officially closed its doors on January 21, 1917. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson survived his press by only a few years, dying in September 1922.

  Exactly twelve days after his death, Annie was contacted by Emery Walker’s lawyers and instructed to surrender the Doves Type, along with the punches and matrices, on pain of immediate litigation. In response, Annie published her husband’s will, wherein he detailed his intention to destroy the Doves Type. A lengthy spat of legal proceedings ensued that likely cost Annie upward of twelve hundred pounds. But the destruction of the Doves Type had been effected, and no amount of money was going to bring it back. Walker even attempted to hire Edward Prince, the original punch cutter, to re-create the lost font. But by 1922, Prince was seventy-six years old, and neither his eyes nor his hands were up to the task.

  Cobden-Sanderson’s ashes were interred at the Doves Bindery in 1922. Annie’s ashes followed four years later. In 1928 the River Thames flooded its banks and washed through the building, so it’s likely that Cobden-Sanderson himself ended up at the bottom of the Thames, entombed in its waters right alongside his beloved type.

  Emery Walker outlived his crusty old printing rival, but he spent the last ten years of his life knowing that Cobden-Sanderson had bested him. The Doves Type was gone forever. There was no hope of ever finding it again—unless, of course, you had some kind of Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

  Cobden-Sanderson ultimately underestimated posterity’s admiration of his font. Over the next century, one devotee of the Doves Type has proved to stand above all others: Robert Green, an English designer who spent three years painstakingly re-creating the type from books printed by the Doves Press. In November 2013, almost one hundred years after it was destroyed, Green released the first publicly available Doves typeface. Since this was the twenty-first century and no one needed punch cutters or metal matrices anymore, Green was able to release it as a digital download for a nominal fee.

  In October 2014, while one of the authors of this book sat back daydreaming of finding the Doves Type in the Thames one day, Green went one step further. He hired divers from the Port of London Authority to scour the river for any sign of the lost metal type. Even after a century (and a few Hammersmith Bridge bombings by the IRA), Green’s team succeeded in exhuming 150 individual pieces of the Dove font dumped by Cobden-Sanderson in 1916.

  Now we have the Doves Type back (kind of). You can—nay, should—buy a digital re-creation of the complete font for forty pounds online. Doves Type even has its own Twitter feed. As a final act of justice, Green is donating half the recovered Doves font to the Emery Walker Trust. The execution of the original agreement between the Doves partners may have come a century late, but better posthumously late than posthumously never.

  The Private Press Movement was a rebellion against the increasing industrialization of printing. It was a revolution fought with ink recipes, and carefully weighted homemade paper, and original typefaces inspired by the first decades of Gutenberg’s press. From that movement emerged a “Visionary and a Fanatic” who would make such dazzling books that one glance is enough to induce goosebumps. Today Doves books are some of the most beloved and sought-after creations of the Private Press Movement. The spirit of that crusade led to a reexamination of every aspect of print. Its innovations spread throughout the printing business, becoming one of the strongest influences on twentieth-century book design.

  Over the past century, typography and graphic design have blossomed in ways few could have predicted. But here’s a prediction we’re reasonably sure of: if the 1890s produced its Cobden-Sanderson in reaction to Koenig presses and Linotype machines, it’s safe to assume that the twenty-first century will have numerous Cobden-Sandersons in reaction to the increasing digitization of our times. As long as humans stay human—and by that we mean rebellious visionaries—the spirit of the Private Press Movement will never sink into the dark waters of obscurity.

  11

  BLIFTER!

  ON A CLEAR DAY IN 1928, a plane flew over Manhattan leaving a trail of smoke reading, “MURDER?” It was the Roaring Twenties, the “Era of Wonderful Opportunity,” and advertising was as drunk as the rest of us, Prohibition be damned. Exhibit A: The publisher Covici-Friede decides it’s a good idea to emblazon a vaguely threatening but mostly confusing message across the sky as a promotion for the release of Murder, a book by Evelyn Johnson and Gretta Palmer. The Twenties blossomed in the form of movie tie-ins, gaudy dust jackets, barbershop quartet competitions, and “sandwich men” who functioned as walking billboards—all in the service of selling books.

  Yet there was an imminent end to this literary carnival, where the excesses of exuberance flirted with disaster. Dragged into the Great Depression along with the rest of the world, by 1930 book publishers in America were facing an economic crisis—one that potentially spelled the end of the publishing industry as they knew it. Publishers needed someone to stand against the chaos and hold everything together. They needed Eddie Bernays, known to the advertising world as the Father of Spin.

  IN ADVANCE of the carefree 1920s, the printing industry had taken giant leaps in mechanization. Innovations such as the Linotype machine and high-speed rotary presses enabled publishers to churn out books and periodicals at many times the rate of hand presses. The Industrial Age brought the world a flood of books. Yay! But that wasn’t actually a good thing. No! At least not yet. Um . . . ambivalence? As print historian Ted Striphas has observed, “Today accumulating printed books and shelving them in one’s home may seem like mundane facts of life. In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, those activities couldn’t be assumed and needed to be learned.”

  Learned? Why would someone need to learn to buy books? That’s just what you do whenever you go into town, or get birthday money, or fill the swear jar all the way. But this consumerist mind-set that we take for granted owes a great deal to folks like Eddie Bernays. At the turn of the twentieth century, most Americans simply didn’t buy books. One in three homes owned no books whatsoever. Those that did usually limited them to a Bible, an almanac, and perhaps a few spellers for their children. What other books did a person really need? In 1921 only 4 percent of Americans visited a bookstore, and almost all of them lived in metropolitan areas.

  In the nineteenth century, most books were either a luxury beyond the average American’s financial reach or “like furniture . . . hand-me-downs or the rare gift for a special occasion . . . there was little need to buy another [book] until the old [one] wore out.” No wonder people didn’t buy books. If we had to read The Da Vinci Code until it literally fell apart before we could buy the next Song of Ice and Fire we’d just stop reading altogether. Rabid nineteenth-century readers were more likely to simply subscribe to their local circulating libraries.

  The printing industry in America had reached an unprecedented level of efficiency, but our buying habits had not. Manufacturers such as Henry Ford had learned how to run their businesses as profitably as possible with the help of the assembly line, and the book world followed suit. Publishing, however, had become almost too efficient. Ac
cording to Striphas, “The book industry had, in a sense, become a victim of its own success. Its capacity to produce books had grown so rapidly and to such a degree in the early twentieth century that it had lost touch with supply and demand—if it ever had it to begin with.”

  That we haven’t always been the responsible Black Friday consumers we are today may be a concept difficult for most Americans. It’s only recently that we’ve been convinced we have to buy things on a regular basis in order to be contributing members of a growing economy and people with individual worth. How can those around us possibly understand that we have a personality or basic taste unless we own things to prove it? Americans needed to undergo a fundamental reeducation. We needed to learn that what we buy is every bit as important as what we say or what we do.

  Consumptionism is the name given to the new doctrine; and it is admitted today to be the greatest idea that America has given the world; the idea that workmen and masses be looked upon not simply as workers and producers, but as consumers.

  —CHRISTINE FREDERICK, SELLING MRS. CONSUMER, 1929

  The greatest thing our country has given the world is consumption? That . . . that doesn’t sound right. Yet, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, consumerism in America became one of our defining traits.

  As the trend toward consumerism grew in the early years of the twentieth century, publishers were poised to take advantage of a number of cultural changes that spurred interest in private reading. For one, we stopped reading together. Picture a cozy Victorian scene, where a family gathers around the fireplace and reads aloud from the Good Book. While Dad or Mom dutifully droned on, the kids would be trying to find anything (please, God, anything at all) to focus on that was more interesting than scripture. But about the turn of the twentieth century, solitary reading gained more and more popularity. Most appealing were the kinds of books that you don’t really want to read together with your dear old dad, aka novels.

  The landscape of American life was also changing, and literary life changed along with it. Illiteracy had declined dramatically in the early decades of the twentieth century, and urbanization had ballooned. As any New Yorker will tell you, cities are particularly great for providing bookish resources: libraries, bookstores, schools, and universities. So as Americans moved into the cities, they read more books.

  When Americans went to war, they also read more books. Down in the trenches of the First World War, books served as cheap, quiet entertainment amid the hurry-up-and-wait practicalities of the average soldier’s life. Publishers of the early twentieth century agreed that the most successful American ad campaign in recent memory had been the government’s push for donations of books to send to World War I soldiers. “[The] sign ‘Books Wanted’ appeared in the newspapers, on millions of posters, on cards, on streamers and banners, in street cars, on billboards, on the backs of books—wherever there were eyes to behold.” The success of this unprecedented national campaign led publisher Alexander Grosset to boast in 1919, “At last the book business has come into its own.”

  Now all publishers had to do was take advantage of all those potential readers—which wasn’t as easy as it might seem. “I hold very strongly to the opinion,” said one New Jersey librarian, “that book publishers are a very stupid lot as far as the art of salesmanship is concerned.” In fact, advertisers were doing ten times better with Abba-Zaba bars and Bit-O-Honey than they were Tales of the Jazz Age. “The American Academy of Political and Social Sciences . . . estimated that the average American [in the 1920s] spent $1.10 for books annually, compared with . . . $11.00 for candy.”

  Helen Woodward, one of the best-known advertisers in the trade, argued in 1920 that it was time “publishers invest in an author with the same foresight which a soap manufacturer might invest in soap.” It was in this decade that advertising agencies started offering services tailored specifically to the book industry. Print ads devoted to the author himself, rather than the work alone, began to appear. Author portraits became more common on dust jackets. Blurbs, a term invented only in 1907, began their hyperbolic ascent. Where there used to be blank pages at the end of a book, now Doubleday, as a teaser, printed the first chapter of the next book in the series.

  Today many people associate the earliest dust jackets with famous books from the 1920s. Though this is far from accurate (you can find dust jackets on some mid-nineteenth-century books), the Jazz Age is the time when jackets came into their own as reliable tools for promotion. Just think of that iconic jacket for The Great Gatsby—the saturated blue, the piercing green eyes, the yellow spark above the author’s name. This jacket, issued in 1925, now spells the difference between a $4,000 first edition and a $150,000 first edition. Dust jackets were that blast of color appearing in every store window—flashy ads for the books that publishers wanted consumers to buy. They were so successful, in fact, that some critics worried jackets might be mistaken for real art: “[W]e predict that you will live to see Bibles with a jacket, by Billy Sunday.” (This prediction did come true—you can find Bibles with dust jackets today—though as far as we can tell, that had little to do with the efforts of evangelical preacher Billy Sunday.)

  Not everyone fell for the hype. In 1919, Yale professor William Lyon Phelps grumbled: “I wish the publishers would quit putting jackets on their books. The first thing I do when I get a book is to throw the jacket away without reading it. It has no business there . . . To find laudation and praise on a slip-cover often antagonizes intelligent readers. The slip-cover should have the name of the book and author, and a sober statement of the purpose of the book.”

  Happily for everyone, Phelps wasn’t taken seriously. And now, because original dust jackets are so valuable to collectors, Phelps’s stripped-down twentieth-century collection would be worth next to nothing. With the exception of books from the earliest years of the century, most of these first editions aren’t considered collectible at all if they are missing their dust jackets.

  Publishers were beginning to figure out the concept of publicity. One infamous printer of paperbacks, E. Haldeman-Julius, realized that his reprint of de Maupassant’s Tallow Ball wasn’t selling so well. Tallow and ball are not particularly interesting words. But do you know what is? Prostitute. Haldeman-Julius reissued the book under the title A Prostitute’s Sacrifice, and sales went from fifteen thousand to fifty-five thousand copies.

  The aforementioned jacket-stripping Phelps entered the fray when he released a list of the “100 best novels.” Because it’s a list, and it’s opinionated, and it’s about books, you know it’s going to be hella controversial. Soon everyone was talking about it. Thus Phelps participated in what might be called the inaugurating event of BuzzFeed (a website he surely would have despised). Literary discussions were becoming publicity stunts, and bestseller lists were becoming news.

  One of the most natural advertising tools for a book was the perception of status, prestige, and power bestowed upon its owner. To do that most efficiently, we needed a way to physically show people around us that we were better than they because we’d read Ulysses. (Or at least had purchased Ulysses and read the first thirty pages, then skipped to Molly’s soliloquy at the end.) Enter the bookshelf.

  “Introduce a little touch of modernism,” announces one article from the March 1929 edition of American Home. “A moderately worn appearance lends flavor to a book . . . If you want your books around you, you must have proper receptacles for them. While the covers of the books may be ever so worn, if they are attractively housed, the effect will be pleasing.”

  The bookshelf! Where American consumerism and neurotically obsessing over your social status can be displayed in one convenient location. The article goes on to declare in Stepford Wife–speak, “Certainly you, yourself, will be far better satisfied when surrounded by your old favorites than if you had a most harmonious array chosen solely . . . to please the eye but quite devoid of anything within.” A bunch of glass grapes on a doily may be pretty, but like you, they’d be cul
turally dead inside.

  Publishers loved this development. Let’s face it, nothing is sadder than an empty bookshelf. According to Janice Radway, “Potentially every book sale could generate two forms of profit. On one hand it could generate cash for its publisher. On the other hand it could also produce perceived changes in the status of the individual who bought it.” This is known as the “fetishism of commodities,” that is, investing objects (in this case, books) with “certain naturally occurring, inherent properties.” For example, consider the self-confidence one might achieve from owning a set of Emerson essays, as this ad recommended: “To fully recognize what magnetism there is in your own personality read CULTURE, WEALTH, BEHAVIOR, POWER.”

  With Americans building and filling their bookshelves to keep up with the Joneses, the future of the printing industry should have looked bright—and indeed it did, at least until the fateful year 1929. You know what American economic disaster we’re talking about here, so say it with us: the Great Book of the Month Club.

  The Book of the Month Club actually launched three years earlier, as the brainchild of New York adman Harry Scherman, but 1929 was the turning point. It had taken him years to perfect a subscription-based service that sold books using methods similar to those employed by companies selling canned goods, tobacco, and soap. It’s also how meth is sold today (sort of): “[Scherman] realized that he could not make money unless, following their first purchase, buyers were hooked into returning for additional ones. After some false starts, he devised a plan that combined the use of the mails with a subscription feature that insured the necessary ‘repeat business.’”

  By 1929, with a monthly cycle of guaranteed sales numbering in the tens of thousands, the Book of the Month Club had accumulated real weight to throw around with publishers. In the wake of its success, other book clubs soon sprang up, and many of them didn’t play well with others. In particular, a subscription service known as the Literary Guild attempted to sell copies of new hardcover fiction at dramatically slashed prices. The Literary Guild was a bit like the Incredible Hulk to the Book of the Month’s Bruce Banner: a good idea gone way, way out of control. While the Book of the Month Club relied on the taste and celebrity of its well-respected literary judges, in 1929 the Literary Guild began emphasizing cheap prices as its main selling point. Book club editions flooded the market, and even today they are the bane of collectors, who have all had the experience of finding an apparent first edition of The Grapes of Wrath—in dust jacket!—only to learn that it’s a book club edition worth ten dollars, not ten thousand.